A Centering Practice

Lao Tzu is supposed to have said that anxiety lives in the future and depression lives in the past, and that peace can only be found in the present. I don’t know if the attribution is real. I know the diagnosis is accurate often enough to be useful. Anxiety, in the moments I’ve felt it most acutely and in the leaders I sit with who name it, is almost always mental energy spent bracing for something that hasn’t happened yet. Depression, differently, tends to pull energy backward, replaying what already did.

Neither state responds well to being argued with. What tends to help, in my experience, is something simpler: a way of physically relocating your attention to the only place either problem can actually be addressed, which is right now. Here is a short practice I use, and teach, for doing that.

Find a position you can hold without effort — sitting or standing, eyes open or closed, whichever keeps you more present rather than more comfortable. Begin breathing on a count: in for four, hold for four, out for six. Don’t rush to the visualization before the breath has your attention. The counting is doing real work — it’s giving your mind a task specific enough to crowd out the future and the past.

Once the breath has settled, picture a column of light starting at your heart, moving up through your head and down through your torso. Let it grow as you keep breathing — up into the sky above you, down through the ground beneath you — until you’re standing, in your mind, inside something larger than the moment that was worrying you. Stay there as long as it holds.

When you’re ready, let the light draw back in, slowly, to where it started at your heart. Two more breaths. And then, before you open your eyes or return to whatever was next on the list, a moment of actual gratitude — not performed, just noticed. What, right now, in this exact body, in this exact minute, is actually fine.

Start with three minutes. There’s no version of this that requires more discipline than you already have; it only requires doing it before you’re sure you need it, which is usually the hardest part of any practice worth keeping. What would it change, to have a little more peace available to you on an ordinary Tuesday, before anything has gone wrong at all?